Use of sunflower meal in broiler chicks feeding

A trial was carried out to evaluate the broiler chicks performance fed with increasing sunflower meal levels. A total of 1200 one-day-old chicks were allotted in a completely randomized design with six treatments. four replicates and 50 birds by experimental unit. The treatments consisted on a corn, soybean meal based control diet (RT) and five others with 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50% of soybean meal protein replacement by sunflower meal protein. A quadratic effect of the sunflower meal levels on feed gain at initial phase, on feed intake and average weight gain at growing phase and on weight gain at total period were observed. In isoenergetic and isoarninoacid diets for digestible methionine+cystine and lysine. the soybean meal protein can be replaced by the sunflower meal protein up to 30% level, which corresponds to nearly 15% of sunflower meal inclusion in the broiler chicks diets.